Professor helps lead international construction group

Arizona State University engineer Samuel Ariaratnam has taken on a top leadership role for a growing international engineering and construction technology association.

He is beginning a three-year term as chairman of the United Kingdom-based International Society for Trenchless Technology (ISTT), which has more than 5,000 members in 32 countries on six continents.  He is only the second North American to serve as the organization’s chairman.

Ariaratnam is a professor in the Del E. Webb School of Construction. The school is part of the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, one of ASU’s Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering.

The ISTT promotes the benefits of trenchless technology, a rapidly growing sector of the construction and civil engineering industry.

It involves various advanced sustainable construction methods and technologies that can be used to install, repair or replace underground infrastructures with far less disruption to roadways, businesses and homes than conventional underground construction techniques.

More and more governments are seeing the environmental and societal benefits of adopting these method s and technologies, Ariaratnam says.

Ariaratnam’s teaching and research focuses on urban infrastructure management and rehabilitation. His expertise is in trenchless engineering applied to horizontal directional drilling, trenchless pipe replacement and underground utility asset management.

He serves on the editorial boards of Trenchless Technology Magazine, Trenchless Engineering, and the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Journal of Construction Engineering and Management and the Journal of Pipeline Engineering Systems and Practice.

He joined the ASU faculty in 2001.